Charles Zuill is acknowledged as one of Bermuda’s most important and innovative artists. His work has earned international recognition and been exhibited and collected in Bermuda, the US, the UK and the Azores.
Regarded as one of the founding fathers of modernist painting in Bermuda, Zuill trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, England and later studied at New York University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. While he was an art professor at Bermuda College in the 1980s he led a movement away from the landscape tradition with his abstract and conceptual works.
A local pioneer of experimental techniques, he spent more than 20 years developing the almost scientific art of meticulous “gray scale” paintings before embarking on an equally experimental and successful “earth painting” phase in the late 1980s, using organic materials mixed with acrylic paint.
In addition, Zuill has made an invaluable contribution to the arts in Bermuda as a teacher and critic and as an active member of several arts organisations. He has been a professor of fine arts at the Bermuda College, was chairman of the Bermuda Arts Council from 1994 to 1998 and was a founder and director of the Bermuda Arts Centre in Dockyard.
More recently, he has brought his considerable experience and historical knowledge to art criticism, writing regularly for The Royal Gazette, making it a principle to “stick strictly to critiquing the art, not the artist”.
As important as his influence as an artist was his role as a founding trustee of the Bermuda National Gallery. Although Hereward Watlington, Desmond Fountain and Michael Darling created the Gallery’s governing body, the Bermuda Fine Arts Trust by Act of Parliament in 1982, it was Zuill’s work in forming and directing a hand-picked steering committee that made the National Gallery a reality in 1992.
Zuill has been closely involved with the Gallery’s activities ever since, acting as chairman of the Exhibitions Committee and playing a key role in landmark shows such as fellow Bermudian Bill Ming’s first major Bermuda exhibition in 1994 and “A Window On The Azores” in 1996. Zuill himself has been the subject of two important solo exhibitions at the Gallery— “A Summer Series” in 1995, and a major retrospective, “The Science of Art”, in 2006.
Charles and his twin brother Henry (1935-2009) were born to Alan and Lilla Zuill and grew up in Flatts, along with their sisters Elizabeth and Esther. The brothers would spend hours exploring the then little developed hills around Flatts, birdwatching and collecting fossils and vegetation for their own natural history museum. Henry became a biologist and nature remained a constant theme in Charles’ work.
Educated at Whitney Institute, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts at Atlantic Union College, Massachusetts. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York in 1969, and earned his PhD in Art Theory and Criticism at New York University in 1984.
From 1960 to 1961, he studied with British painters Bernard Dunstan and Peter John Gerrard at Byam Shaw. He also studied with renowned British sculptor Leslie Cubitt Bevis at the Heatherly School in London in 1963.
He spent a year in Darmstadt, Germany from 1963 to 1964 where he studied German and also visited the Bauhaus archive. Josef Albers, the German-born American Bauhaus artist and educator, was artist-in-residence while Zuill was at Rochester and was an important influence. The Bauhaus school of design, architecture and arts was later a key reference point in his doctoral dissertation.
In 1964, he began his teaching career as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, at Atlantic Union College, South Lancaster, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1971. From 1973 to 1975 he was Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Walla Walla College, College Place, Washington. He was Professor of Fine Arts at Southern College in Collegedale, Tennessee from 1976 to 1983. He then returned home to Bermuda to take up the post of professor of Fine Arts at Bermuda College, where he remained until 1999 when he became Associate Professor of Art History at Andrews University in Michigan.
In 1983, he was made a Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where he studied with Richard Anuszkiewicz, one of the founders and leading exponents of op art during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Despite his reputation as a modernist abstract artist, Charles Zuill has always considered himself primarily a landscape artist. However, in an essay written to accompany his 1995 solo exhibition at the Bermuda National Gallery, he admitted: “I realise that, for some, my approach to painting is not only different but even alien. While I do not see my work as especially abstract in the common understanding of that often-misunderstood word, I realise that my depictions are not exactly the world we see when we look out at our surroundings.”
His ground-breaking gray scale series resulted from a severe artistic block he suffered while studying at the Rochester Institute in 1968. To overcome the problem, he decided to investigate in depth one basic art element, the gray scale.
What was intended as a few weeks study eventually lasted 20 years as Zuill, with the aid of a computerised spectrophotometer, perfected a mathematically precise gray scale of 256 carefully mixed gradients of black and white paint. The often-austere works would take up to six months each to complete. “It takes a kind of obsessive, compulsive character like me to even think to do something like this,” he has written. “The gray scale was a tool that allowed me to experience within myself various aspects of seeing. It was a study about seeing.”
The gray scale paintings would form the basis of his 500-page doctoral dissertation, The Theoretical and Practical Development of the Tone Value Step Gradient. His research took him to Bauhaus sites in Dessau and Weimar, both then in East Germany. Through the Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland, he had the opportunity to meet with the famous Swiss painter’s son Felix and Richard Paul Lohse (1902-1988), another renowned Swiss painter who later assisted in the dissertation research.
While researching his dissertation he read The Elements of Drawing by the respected English art theorist John Ruskin, in which he claimed he could make mud glow if allowed to gradate it from light to dark. Zuill’s experiments led to his series of soil, or earth, paintings.
As the often-coarse mixtures of soil, sand and other elements did not spread well using traditional brushes, he used his hands, sticks, branches and other natural implements. The result was a “deeply satisfying” and emotional experience that connected to his other consuming interest in nature.
“The use of earth as a basic element took on, for me, deep meaning,” he wrote. “It is the stuff of life and death and by making it centrally important to my work, I saw this as an act of homage.” The act of going out and obtaining the materials, he added, also gave the work a unique sense of place.
The soil paintings led in turn to what he calls “experimental paintings”, using both natural materials and natural forces such as gravity, as in poured paintings, vibrations, bubbles and magnetism.
“I play a game with myself in that I ponder what might happen if I did this or that,” he wrote in an introduction to his 2006 retrospective at the Bermuda National Gallery. “I remember once asking myself what would happen if I added liquid soap to my paint and then using a straw, blow bubbles onto my paper or canvas.” The Gallery described the exhibition, The Science Of Art, “the result of a lifetime’s experimentation by a master alchemist and artist”.
“I see my work as real but not realistic,” he has said. “What I have done all my life is to create art that is stimulated by observations of nature. As to style I am not sure that my art fits any particular category.”
